The UK unemployment total rose unexpectedly in the three months to June to 2.49m. Photograph: Grant Falvey/LNP

The labour market figures released this morning show the recovery has almost come to a halt. Very few new jobs were created from April to June compared with the previous three months.

The latest figures also confirm an unusual feature of this recovery – fewer jobs for women and more jobs for men. In previous recoveries, the recovery in employment favoured women. In this recovery, job growth has been strongly male dominated. It remains to be seen whether the reversed gender bias in job growth will continue.

Much attention will also be given to what is happening to unemployment among young people, particularly given recent widespread civil disorder in some cities. Whenever the overall labour market stutters, young people are usually the first to feel the effects because organisations stop hiring. Overall, the number of young people between 16 and 24 defined as unemployed edged up slightly to 950,000. It would not take many more quarters of weak employment growth for the politically explosive one million mark to be reached.

The big question is whether we are seeing a temporary halt in an otherwise commendable labour market performance, or the start of a period of prolonged weakness and steadily rising unemployment. At the moment it is hard to see a strong source of either domestic or export focused growth that would bring significantly faster economic growth over the next six months.

One area of concern domestically is the weakness in real wage growth. Average weekly earnings – excluding bonuses – grew at an annual rate of only 2.2% averaged over the three months to June. This is less than half the rate of inflation. Wage moderation was a great help over the recession in saving jobs and in the early stages of the recovery in supporting job growth. But if real wages continue to fall, it is unlikely we will see much of a recovery in consumer spending – and without that, it will be hard to get the recovery back on track.

However, there are striking disparities within the economy. The financial and business services sector saw average earnings growing at an annual rate of over 5% over the past three months – comfortably ahead of inflation. In contrast, annual wage growth in the public sector and the retailing and hospitality sectors was only 1.9% and 1.7% respectively.

The government cannot do much to directly influence wages. It could lift the pay freeze across the public sector, but with no change in spending plans this would only cost more jobs. It could put the national minimum wage up by more than the recommendation of the Low Pay Commission (LPC); but the LPC has been a good judge of what employers in low wage sectors can afford, and going higher would be risky. The government can do little about the inflation rate, not least because control of inflation is in the hands of the Bank of England. The bank, quite rightly, sees another recession as a bigger threat than bringing inflation down quickly.

The better option, if the chancellor was thinking about a plan B to stimulate domestic demand, would be a targeted cut in tax or increased in-work benefits for less well-off working households. These are most likely to have faced the biggest squeeze in real incomes. They are the least likely to have gained from the reduction in mortgage costs from low interest rates, and they are almost certain to spend all of the extra income.